Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Larry Niven - Ringworld

Sky and earth were to
flat plates, infinitely wide, pressed together; and men were microbes crawling
between the plates… (p. 149)

Coming to Larry Niven’s 1970 Science Fiction classic, Ringworld, with no prior exposure to the
man or his works, I felt much like the novel’s protagonist, Louis Wu. As we
begin, Louis is a world-weary two hundred year old man, and his – as he sums it
up – “xenophilia and restlessness and curiosity” (p. 9) make him agree to join
a mysterious Puppeteer alien’s crew in exploring a vast and distant object, the
Ringworld. The kind of sublime wonder that Louis seeks is much of what draws me
to Science Fiction and other nearby genres, and, though I have not lived two
hundred years, I certainly have read (rather more than) two hundred books and
can feel somewhat jaded as a result. Also like Louis, I had a rather hard time
getting my bearings as the crew – Louis, his lover and the crew’s purported
good luck charm Teela Brown, a catlike and warlike Kzin, and the Puppeteer –
are assembled and off to their destination. Then the sheer awe wrought by the
Ringworld itself blew any doubts away.

The Ringworld combines technological and geographical
scales. It has “three million times the surface area of Earth” (p. 145) and
must have required almost unimaginable powers and technologies in its creation.
After crash landing onto it, our heroes explore the Ringworld to find any means
at all of escaping it. Through them, Niven presents an account of its vastness
that is half scientific and cultural speculation and half adventure.

It’s easy to unthinkingly dismiss Hard Science Fiction as
mere scientific play, devoid of literary or philosophical value, but doing so
ignores how envisioning man- or alienmade changes to the universe on this scale
requires the writer to explore the universe itself and man’s position in it.
The moment when Niven’s engagement with larger, philosophical questions becomes
clearest may be his allusion to Dante’s Divine
Comedy:

“Oddly, Louis found
himself thinking of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dante’s universe had been a complex artifact, with the souls of men
and angels show as precisely machined parts of the vast structure. The
Ringworld was obtrusively an artifact, a made thing. You couldn’t forget it,
not for an instant; for the handle rose overhead, huge and blue and checkered
from beyond the edge of infinity” (p. 143).

Niven writes from deep within Science Fiction’s most central
and hardened bunkers, and a kind of modesty keeps him from fully stating the
impact of his allusion. But, by outlining Dante’s understanding of the cosmos
and then moving to the Ringworld, he makes his implication clear: Ringworld (and many other books of its
ilk) posits a modern, scientifically-based view of the universe and of man to
answer the faith-based perspective that has dominated for centuries. Most of this
is done, like the allusion quoted above, by implication; Niven dwells on the
science itself or the cultural ramifications of it and leaves the reader to
glean broader ideas from that. One obvious idea, appearing in the above as well
as many other places in the novel, is his use of terms like infinity in his discussion of the
Ringworld. Obviously, they serve a literal descriptive purpose, but infinity’s
connotations transcend the horizons Niven describes. Words like that play on
the same thematic register as his addressing of Dante does.

The most striking example of science and religion’s
convergence may be the Eye Storm that the characters discover on Ringworld’s
surface: it is a massive, powerful wind pattern in the shape of a human eye.
Their first thoughts, of course, are of supernatural manifestations, and those
thoughts bring terror. Before long, they have come up with a well-reasoned
theory of how a meteor strike could create this kind of weather pattern, a
theory that proves correct – but a material cause does not rule out wider
resonances. Just because there is no designated God in Niven’s universe, and
just because the laws of physics are followed, does not mean that the events do
not take on a significance greater than the simply physical realm.

The universe that Niven explores is immense and amoral.
Louis is, at best, agnostic. He knows that there is no force in the universe
out to help man: “The universe is against
me,” said Louis Wu. “The universe hates me. […] I am two hundred years old and still healthy. But not because the
universe loves me” (p. 136). Progress is possible, but it is made by
dedication and scientific advancement alone, and it is made in spite of
everything life can throw at it. Still, men (and aliens) can work on a grand scale.
They can escape the explosion of the galactic core, deal with the seemingly
insurmountable problems of overpopulation and dwindling resources. They can
create Ringworlds.

But progress is not a straight line, and it is never simply
benevolent. Again and again, the characters return to the blurred line between
powerful tools and powerful weapons, something likely best summed up in what
the human race has come to call the Kzinti Lesson: A reaction drive is a weapon, powerful in direct ratio to its efficiency
(p. 92). Any advancement is a double-edged sword, as usable for destruction
as salvation, as likely to send man crashing back to barbarism through its
firepower as it is to elevate him through its speed. And even the best advances
cannot safeguard us or any other beings forever. As Louis realizes when
studying the fallen men of the Ringworld: cycles
of culture and barbarism were man’s natural lot (p. 274).

The absence of a God does not mean that the denizens of
Niven’s universe live in a state of total freedom. Rather, it is a universe in
which Louis has to admit by the end of the novel that We’ve all been playing god on various levels (p. 318). When dealing
with the barbaric Ringworld natives, the protagonists use their technology to
play Gods to get the natives’ cooperation, a fascinating gambit that precedes
K.J. Parker’s use of it in her Scavenger trilogy and that has varied but gripping results for our heroes. But the manipulations
don’t end when the natives are left in the dust. It becomes clear that each of
the civilizations encountered is doing its best to guide and alter the course
of its neighbors to suit itself, with the more technologically advanced
Puppeteers doing a rather better job at, well, puppeting than anybody else. The
dynamic reaches down to an interpersonal level. The Puppeteer in the group has
a tasp, a device capable of inflicting pleasure or pain on any sentient
creature that allows the Puppeteer to “condition” (p. 294) anyone he meets it
as he will, a device that Prill, a woman they encounter, says “made him god” (p.
314).

Alas, Prill herself is the one notable flaw in Niven’s
amoral system of manipulations. When we encounter her, she seems quite
interesting. She is a woman in a position of great power, commanding an
abandoned but still functioning and powerful police station that floats over
the Ringworld and can commandeer any vehicle it comes across. Then we learn
that she got that power entirely through sex, and Niven goes so far as to say: She knew a terribly ancient secret: that
every woman is born with a tasp, and that its power is without limit if she can
learn to use it (p. 293). Viewing all kinds of pleasure and pain as forms
of control could be interesting, but limiting that discussion to women bearing
godlike and manipulative powers of seduction is not only morally questionable
but also just silly. Do women not feel sexual pleasure, and is sex the only
form of pleasure that can influence one’s actions?

Besides overt manipulations, one of the key influencing
factors on Niven’s universe is actually luck. We are not, however, simply
talking about garden-variety luck. No, this luck is genetically enhanced, for
man has been organizing breeding in Niven’s universe through lotteries for
centuries. The result is people like Teela Brown, who was chosen for the
mission precisely because of that luck. All of this frequently feels like it is
pulling in precisely the opposite direction as the rest of Niven’s Hard Science
Fiction creation. At times – such as when Louis reasons that, if she needed to come here without knowing
it, she’d come here anyway (p. 241) – the luck starts to seem simply
divine, or at the bare minimum conscious. Still, some of the places that Niven
goes with it are interesting. Cocooned since birth by her luck, Teela has never
felt pain and so has no empathy and no fear. Always led by that luck, it’s
questionable whether she has free will. And, sheltered by both that luck and
technology, it’s hard to imagine how she could ever die…

Moving from a general contemplation of the book’s themes and
content to an evaluation of its strengths faults, as I suppose I as a reviewer
should likely do at some point, I do have to bring attention to Niven’s
coinages. Some work fine, but others seem to entirely miss the tone he was
going for. Exclaiming finagle (p.
301) just seems silly. Though generally capable of both precise and evocative
prose, Niven does also occasionally get overexcited:

But he had to have a
belt!

And Teela handed him
her scarf! (p. 308)

More seriously, Niven’s questionable gender politics don’t
end with the equivalency of vaginas and tasps that I discussed earlier. The female Puppeteers are “nonsentient”
and “property” (p. 85), and Louis has the habit of referring to
Teela as “my woman” (p. 150), but it’s not till the last section of the novel
that the matter goes inexplicably rampant. That’s when we meet Seeker, whom
Teela falls in love with: He was a hero.
You could tell [… from] the courteous way he talked to Prill, apparently
without realizing that she was of the opposite sex. Because she was another
man’s woman? (p. 297) A hero indeed. Not much longer, we hear that Teela stood behind [Seeker], safe for the
moment in the ring of fighting, looking worried, like a good heroine (p.
307). By the novel’s end, she has finished her descent from character to stock
love interest/object by quite literally selling herself as a sex slave to
Seeker, because he believes in “slavery for women” (p. 299), and she loves him.
Our only other female character, Prill of the Tasp-like genitalia, is a ship’s whore (p. 315) that makes sure
Louis isn’t too sex deprived after Teela leaves and decides to escape the
Ringworld and return to Louis’ civilization because: “I can help your world,
Louis. Your people know little about sex.” (p. 317)

The strangest part about Niven’s treatment of gender is how
distant it is from the book’s core. This is a novel about the vastness of
space, the powers of technology, and the way that men manipulate each other,
three themes that either intersect barely or not at all with the problems of
the above paragraph. Though I can’t say that Ringworld is without faults, it is a powerful and classic example
of what Science Fiction can do, presenting an uncompromising, gripping, and
awe-inspiring view of the universe that is a genuine thrill to explore.

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...Who?

I spend my free time reading and writing. In addition to assorted other content, I'll be posting a book review every Tuesday. I have also published a fair few stories, a complete list of which can be found here. If you want to get in contact with me for any reason, feel free to email me at nskteh[at]gmail[dot]com.